Claiming status and contesting sexual violence and harassment among community health activists in Delhi

Abstract

Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork in an urban poor area in Delhi, this paper examines how Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) experience and critique sexual violence and harassment in the city. Inherent in these women’s critiques is blaming of urban poor men who belong to their social class, resonating with middle-class discourses emerging in urban India. Simultaneously, in their accounts of sexual violence in domestic spaces, women invoked notions of romantic love and familial success. I argue that this discursive tension around urban poor men is linked to women’s attempts to assert and claim higher social status and respectability in the context of highly divided and gendered city. ASHAs made claims and asserted themselves in the multiple arenas of urban life, as their work on women’s health required cultivation of knowledge and engagement with public spaces, intimate spheres, and cultivation of familial roles propagated by the public healthcare programme. Through a reading of de Certeau’s concept of tactics as limited trajectories of claims to urban environments developed among the powerless, I show how access to urban spaces can be revisited as a negotiation and a claim, rather than being shaped only by existing social status. And, I show how responding with readiness to multiple conditions of urban poverty involves negotiation of those claims pertaining both public and private spaces and spheres.

Keywords:

• Community health activists
• India
• public and private sphere
• sexual harassment
• sexual violence
• urban poor

Acknowledgements

I am mostly grateful to the residents of Rajeev Camp, who allowed me to learn about their experiences. I would like to thank for the participants of the Annual Conference of the Asian Dynamics Initiative of the University of Copenhagen, where this paper was presented in its early form, and anonymous reviewers for their comments. My special thanks goes to Atreyee Sen, who’s feedback helped to improve the paper. All the remaining faults are of my own. The writing phase for this paper was funded by M.S. Merian International Centre of Advanced Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS:MP), Delhi, and NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Emilija Zabiliūté is a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Centre for Medical Anthropology. She is currently working on a project exploring relational care among diabetes patients in Delhi. Her research interests include health, care, gender, development, kinship, relatedness, and everyday life among the urban poor in India.